Intro

Given the choice, I’d rather avoid huge complex apps like Android Studio. They use a lot of system resources and are very GUI/point-and-clicky. Those things definitely have their place but I prefer keyboard control where it makes sense, and for me programming in Flutter is one of those situations.

A lot of what Android Studio does behind the scenes is automatically editing text files and running shell commands such as flutter run, flutter build and so on. If you’re comfortable with the terminal these commands are fairly simple to run manually.

As an IDE Android Studio also helps with stuff like syntax highlighting, code completion, refactoring etc. If you’re into Vim it can be set up to give you these pleasantries. I’m sure there is stuff Android Studio can do that Vim can’t, but whatever it is I’m not missing it and I feel good when I use Vim.

I’ve set up a couple of systems with this Flutter dev environment recently and hit some stumbling blocks. They weren’t too hard to resolve but I wanted to write up the process for future reference and to help anybody else in a similar situation.